


beneath red skies (i always ask my brother what eye he wants to open in the dark)

by clytemnestras



Category: Christian Bible, Christian Bible (Old Testament), Sefer Chanoch | Book of Enoch
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angels, Dom/sub, M/M, Other, Pseudo-Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-07
Updated: 2016-06-07
Packaged: 2018-07-13 00:16:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7130468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/pseuds/clytemnestras
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He can feel it again, knows what will happen before it does by some divine vestige still heavy in him. Shaking, lust-drunk. Attraction. Repulsion.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>  <i>“We are too old for this”, Raphael says. Always martyed. Always living on and on. Then, sighing, “I will still come for you.” He smiles. It’s awful.</i></p><p> </p><p>  <i>“I don’t expect you to stop.”</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	beneath red skies (i always ask my brother what eye he wants to open in the dark)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DoreyG](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DoreyG/gifts).



> a/n: herein lie he pronouns and 'brother' used as an epithet but there is some minor genderfuckery because that's how i like my formless divine beings.

They are cyclical, everything is cyclical. Even divine things are creatures of habit. 

It comes with falling, or it comes with the stolen bodies but  _ god  _ he is starving. Time is nothing to them but when it is everything. It’s been too long. Since Rome was burning or Paris was falling or the stock market was crashing or the bees began dying or the second hand on his watch started spinning double-time. 

Doesn’t matter. It’s always too long.

*

Strobes cut past the halos and paint him human and he is hungry, desperately hungry.

His shoulders ache. The house is singing, and he is waiting. The sofas are dirty and soft and beg for bodies to blanket them and almost, almost. He can taste the sweat and sin in the air, lush and gorgeous. Heady. The party is a sweep of shivering skin and forget-me-not sentiments. Everyone wants to ruin themselves for a night. Everyone wants to know what they can survive. Azazel is elemental. He is  _ home.  _

The music feels like balm on his stinging muscles. Glory is a dangerous thing. He feels drunkenly sober, veins lined with fire and angel dust and nothing good enough, nothing enough to choke on. He smiles at a boy, pulls the drink from his hand, licks the taste off his lips. The whiskey burns in the best way, insides shaking to match his skin. 

Unravelling. Or, no. Something else, threaded under his skin, his  _ spine.  _ Pulling. Repelling. Magnetism is more than a scientific principle.

_ So, the chase begins. _

He grabs the boy and presses him close, one leg slotted between his, one hand grazing the dip in his spine. Dizziness sweeps clean through his body, rocking through each nerve, violent and electric. Phantoms in his legs. Wingbeats in his skull. 

He laughs to nobody, but the boy joins in anyway. Everybody in the house wants to feel something. The music thuds through them all, joining them in synced pulses going  _ thud thud thud  _ like landing on the ground or somewhere further, like falling.

He feels good. He feels fucking incredible.

When the arms find his waist he can't hold himself up. They hold him like he might be holy and he let's them keep him there. Safe and quivering and small like home. 

The world stretches out before him, rushing way like elastic and wating to snap. He hears a noise somewhere away, like lightning, a cracked jaw then a mouth hot on his. 

“I was waiting”, he says.

“I know”, Raphael replies. 

He watches in the mirror of somebody’s bathroom when Raphael pulls the shirt over his head and the shift of his shoulders makes the inked wings on his back shift and flutter.

It hurts not to kiss them. The skin must taste like sweat and something other, something awful, and he wants to savour it.

(A small voice wonders where they came from. If he hunted down that dying boy just to feel those wings flex along his spine like sense memory, or if he lay there for hours and hours face down in some dingy back-room as someone carved them bloodily into his skin. He wonders what it would feel like to have drawn them there, pain ebbing between them like bliss.)

The bathroom is small and they are bigger than the air filling it and he lets Raphael kiss the bruises on his wrists that haven't yet healed. He wants to drop to the floor and beg, place these new hands there, ask those fingerprints to press them blue again.

Noiselessly, Raphael takes his hands in his own and drags their mouths together. He swallows every sound.

Azazel’s knees touch the carpet to feel the marks shred his skin away. He pulls these new hips closer - fuller in the palms of his hands than before - and yanks the denim down. Laughing, or mumbling prayer, Raphael holds his wrists above his head and wraps his belt around them, taking the blood away, like divinity should be taken from him, always. 

(He, like god is He, like they all were He before anything else was given to them.)

He smiles up, showing teeth, and leans in. 

*

They drink in the back of a house, sweating and shirtless and crying out for something. Something other, something more.

But there is just this, and them. One night in the procession of one nights that follow, accidentally on purpose like spin the bottle landing on your best friend.

God, he sounds sick. He sounds human. 

He sounds like he needs to shower the night off his filthy skin.

(He won’t though. Wants to roll around in divinity for a while.)

“Should I pray for you?” Raphael is not smiling. His young body is cracking around the aged look in his eyes.

Azazel laughs for him, bringing the bottle to his lips. “You should run.”

“A reverse in roles is always fun”, he digs under his fingernails like there’s something stuck under there, clean as he is. Clean as he acts. 

“Big Boss still not roasting your ass for this? Must be special.  _ Must be love, love, love. _ ” That’s a Lucifer thing to do and say. All of them, rehashed, mangled souls, barely people, barely anything. The line between angel and demon is lined with what they call holy. Angels: Father. Demons: anything that feels deeply enough. Music is good for that.

“That reference is a few decades old, brother.” He is sneering, or smiling, every action involuntary and raw on this new, pretty face.

“Brother? That’s kinky.”

He can feel it again, knows what will happen before it does by some divine vestige still heavy in him. Shaking, lust-drunk. Attraction. Repulsion. 

“We are too old for this”, Raphael says. Always martyed. Always living on and on. Then, sighing, “I will still come for you.” He smiles. It’s awful. 

“I don’t expect you to stop.”

*

The next time happens a month later, year later, some small infinity still rushing over sensitive in his blood. 

(Too much. Too soon.)

Raphael finds him there and twines his wrists, pressing him down down down into the softness and the springs. He gets fucked in the same bed his host-body died in, last trickles of bloodwarmth still hot in the squeezing veins. 

Raphael is silent the whole time. 

He smashes his new, too soft skull straight into Raphael's chin, after. It breaks. It smashes with a snap that zips up his spine. He leaves the room worse, grinning and grinning and grinning. 

*

Azazel hunts Raphael to the desert. Sunspots in his eyes, gunshots in his back. He’s in a woman’s body, to the ankles in sand. 

Raphael squints up at him like he is the sun, like to touch him would be remembering, would be to burn away. 

Azazel has a knife in his hand and he uses it to slice through Raphael’s clothes, pressing to his skin, dancing close to his throat. Long, thin fingers are good for this, feeling sure.

“I could kill you here, let you feel it, let you  _ relish in it _ before they found you some new host to violate. You could feel it all go cold.” 

Raphael breathes in once and goes still. Merciful. Delicate. Azazel kisses his dusty forehead. 

“I won’t”, he says. “But I could, and you would let me. This is what we are.”

The sun presses down on their skin and his feels covered in light. Comfortable and bold, he tips his head towards the light, fingers curled in Raphael’s hair. 

*

They find each other in the overhang of trees blanketing the headstones. Some cemetery or other. London, or Moscow, or Italy. 

Azazel has a cross around his throat, separated from his skin by a thin layer of white cotton. He feels like death. 

“Aren’t you tired?”

Raphael doesn’t look up from the wildflowers, feral, wild rabbits darting through them. “I have always been tired.”

Azazel tenses. His body sings with anger and resignation. “I am tired of everything but this, what does that say?”

“You’re a masochist, brother. Why else would you fall?”

(He is tired. He is bored. He is full of dreadful, half-thought reasons that boil down to those two things.The bell of the church is ringing, perhaps in his head but still loud like crystal, loud enough to crack stone.)

  
“Why does anyone do anything,” he says, “but to feel alive?”


End file.
